Esther Lederberg (1922 - 2006)

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was a US microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics.

She created a technique for studying bacteria and viruses called replica plating. Her husband used this technique in work that later won a Nobel Prize. She also discovered that bacteria mutate randomly, explaining the resistance that is developed to antibiotics, and discovered the lambda phage virus.

Stanley Falkow said of Esther Lederberg that "Experimentally and methodologically she was a genius in the lab." A pioneer research scientist, she faced significant challenges as a woman scientist in the 1950s and 1960s. She was excluded from writing a chapter in the 1966 book Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, a commemoration of molecular biology. According to the science historian Prina Abir-Am, her exclusion was "incomprehensible" because of her important discoveries in bacteriophage genetics.

As Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza later wrote, "Dr. Esther Lederberg has enjoyed the privilege of working with a very famous husband. This has been at times also a setback, because inevitably she has not been credited with as much of the credit as she really deserved. I know that very few people, if any, have had the benefit of as valuable a co-worker as Joshua has had."

She had to fight to gain a position on the Stanford faculty. Retained as a Senior Scientist, in 1974 she was forced to transition to a position as Adjunct Professor of Medical Microbiology "coterminous with research support." (Adjunct Professors are typically un-tenured.)

A lifelong musician, Lederberg was a devotee of early music, and was one of the founding members of the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra.

Avid reader, and member of the Dickens Society of Palo Alto and the Jane Austen Society.

Also maintained a lifelong love of botany and botanical gardens

Known for
Discovered the bacterial virus λ and the bacterial fertility factor F (F plasmid

Described of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction

Developed replica plating

Founded and directed the now-defunct Plasmid Reference Center at Stanford University where she maintained, named, and distributed plasmids of many types, including those coding for antibiotic resistance, heavy metal resistance, virulence, conjugation, colicins, transposons, and other unknown factors.

Find more
Wikipedia

Esther Lederberg memorial website